In the following essay, Griffin surveys the character sketches collected in Twelve Men and A Gallery of Women, as well as the uncollected stories known as the "Black Sheep" series.

In 1919 and 1929 respectively Theodore Dreiser published his two collections of character sketches Twelve Men and A Gallery of Women. Several months before the publication of the latter on November 30, 1929, his six-part serialization of "This Madness—An Honest Novel about Love" began appearing in Hearst's International-Cosmopolitan. Twelve Men and A Gallery of Women were constituted for the most part of pieces that had already appeared in periodicals; "This Madness," essentially a series of three sketches of women with whom Dreiser had intimate relationships in his early middle age, contained material not published before. Together these three collections comprised thirty character sketches. Their number suggests Dreiser's healthy...